Director: Seth MacFarlane
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, makes his feature writing and directing debut with this high-concept fantasy comedy that shares several cast members and jokes with his monumentally bad-taste TV animation. MacFarlane also voices the eponymous Ted, a teddy that comes to life after young John gets it as a Christmas present in the 80s. Now a grown man, John (Mark Wahlberg) still lives with Ted, and he’s been seeing Lori (Mila Kunis) for four years. But she worries Ted is preventing John from making a commitment with her, and that perhaps it’s time he moved out. Though the structure is essentially that of a rom-com, it’s the same premise and the same joke as Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Paul from a couple of years ago, with a swearing, pot-smoking teddy bear replacing a swearing, pot-smoking alien. And like that film, it’s a moderately amusing one that doesn’t really know how to exploit the laughs beyond its central conceit. Like Paul, it relies largely on crudity and the sheer incongruence of its title character and, like Paul, there are fewer laughs than you might reasonably expect. It’s a case of throwing everything at the screen joke-wise in the hope that something sticks, with an OK number of guffaws among the ill-disciplined shenanigans. But it’s enlivened by some terrific cameos and is still a reasonably enjoyable movie experience, especially if you’re on the humour’s wavelength.
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